[dl] Misc.
Seven years after their last studio release,
the Black Crowes are back, making new music with a message.
By Kevin Raub
There's irony in the title of the new Black Crowes
album, Warpaint. The Southern rockers who first scored
commercial success with 1990's Shake Your Money Maker and
its peppy hit "Hard to Handle" have certainly had their battles.
The group went on hiatus after its last studio release, 2001's
Lions. And front man Chris Robinson, who says he was
convinced Lions would be the last Crowes album, even went
off on his own to produce two excellent solo discs (2002's New
Earth Mud and 2004's The Magnificent Distance). But
now, with Warpaint, the Black Crowes have found peace
together again. We asked Robinson to talk about the calm after the
storm and to give us a preview of the new music.
The Black Crowes, who had their heyday in the
1990s, experienced quite a rebirth with Lions in 2001. But the band
self-imploded shortly thereafter. Was it frustrating for you not to
have capitalized on the newfound momentum?
Like anything else, it's about dynamics. When
you're young, all you want to do is get deeper and deeper into
your expression and music. After a while, people get on
different pages. Their egos change, people change - all sorts of
stuff. To me, I felt Lions was the last Black
Crowes album, because I wasn't happy. Then, when we decided to
get back and do the Crowes, I was glad I had walked away from
the band when I did and took those years to do some things and
relearn some things. As Miles Davis said, "Let the music change
me."
Your approach in releasing Warpaint
is unorthodox. For one thing, you decided not to make any of the
music available to journalists - including me - or anyone else
prior to the official March 4 album release. Why?
We want everyone to hear it. But in the nature of the
way technology has changed stuff, I think you want to be able to
control your presentation as much as possible. We may be sort of
antiquated in that thinking, but that's the reality of it. We want
to try to have the biggest splash we can since we haven't had any
new music in a long time. And, of course, it means we don't trust
you.
You've also announced plans for a series of
live shows this month where you'll play Warpaint, and only
Warpaint, in its entirety. Really? A whole show without
singing "Jealous Again"?
Well, it's been a good 18 years of "Jealous
Again," so I'm hoping everyone can go without it for a few
months. But the reality of it is that this is the most proud we
have ever been of a recording, and it really put our locomotive
back on the tracks. So, we want to get out there and play it in
one unadulterated lump.
Let's talk about the music. There's a track
on the new album called "Goodbye Daughters of the Revolution."
What's it about?
That's a jumping-off place for our record. It mirrors
the theme of the title, Warpaint. It's a super
rock-and-roll sort of song. But inside of it, it's saying, 'There's
freedom to be had in your adventure, but the only way you're going
to be able to feel it is to fight for your own.' No matter what the
fear-driven powers that be are telling you - it could be anything,
corporations, banks, etc. - there is always stuff inside of you
that's truly revolutionary.
Now, let's suppose I'm drowning my sorrows
and having a nip of Southern Comfort. Which of your new songs would
I want to listen to?
"Oh Josephine." It's the "5:45 in the morning and the
sun is coming up" song. For some of us, there's great wisdom to be
found in those times. There is some clarity in the middle of the
chaos. The emotion of the song harks back to where I have
personally been and is more optimistic about where love can take
you.
Which new song will most surprise die-hard
Crowes fans?
Warpaint is what we do: Rootsy,
psychedelicovertone- based rock and roll. But maybe "Whoa Mule,"
the last song on the record. We were in this beautiful studio in
Woodstock, New York, on top of a mountain with a beautiful
courtyard. We were working on the song out there, and it sounded
really good, so we attached 400 feet of cable together and recorded
it outside with all the birds chirping and everything that was
going on. We only had a rough framework, but it all came together
in one take and everybody played it live. The main message in the
song is, "We're dirty, but we're dreaming." In a day and age of
shameless promotion, I like the idea that not everyone is squeaky
clean, not everyone is shining up to look like everyone else. Some
of us are keen to keep our uncombed hair and our dirty jeans.
Finding Homer
An author and NPR
contributor discovers that epic journeys can still be
had.
The Book: No-Man's Lands: One Man's Odyssey
Through The Odyssey by Scott Huler (Crown, $25). In stores
March 11.
Classic works like Homer's The Odyssey tend
to evoke a fight-or-flight response. Readers either consume the
book with gusto or run away from it. In Scott Huler's case, it was
read and then run.
With his first child on the way, the 44-year-old
author turned to the 2,700-year-old The Odyssey to guide
him through one last adventure before he had to start changing
diapers. For six months, he backpacked his way through the
Mediterranean, retracing the 10-year journey of the fabled Greek
warrior Odysseus from the battlefields of Troy to his home in
Ithaca.
Huler consulted the vast and still-growing body of
Odyssean scholarship to match his journey as closely as possible to
Odysseus's trip to Hell (literally) and back. Though he had to make
some creative swaps - he substituted Rome's catacombs for the halls
of Hades, for instance - he tried to stay true to the classic
wherever possible.
The Cyclops's cave on the Sicilian island of Trapani
was fairly easy to find: It's at the end of Via del Ciclope
(Cyclops Road). Likewise, sailors for two millennia have known the
whereabouts of the Sirens' island. But not everything was as easy
to find. Scylla and Charybdis? The only monsters threatening
Huler's kayak off the coast of eastern Sicily were the oversized
cargo ships.
A frequent contributor to National Public Radio,
Huler is a highly entertaining travel companion with an oral
storyteller's flair for humor. There's a hilarious scene in which
he imagines how Odysseus's 10-year separation from his wife,
Penelope, might have been different had they simply had e-mail.
("O. - I appreciate your excuses, but Nestor got home two years
ago. Whither my sacker of cities?")
But Huler is a thoughtful traveler as well, aware
that the journey is always more important than the destination. And
Odysseus's journey, he argues, isn't written for the schoolkids
upon whom it's foisted. It's for middle-aged people who've faced
difficult trials of their own. No six-headed monsters, perhaps, but
struggles with mortality and a quest for a legacy just the same. -
Kristin Baird Rattini
The Artist Formerly Known as Ruthless
Machiavelli may not be as Machiavellian as you
think.
The Book: The Prince, translation by Peter
Constantine (Modern Library, $8). In stores March 11.
It's funny how some people get remembered. For
instance, nobody hears the name of Mexican General Antonio de Padua
María Severino López de Santa Anna y Pérez de Lebrón and says,
"Sure, he killed everyone at the Alamo, but he's the reason we have
chewing gum."
Niccolò Machiavelli is another case in point. Today,
we remember him for his 1514 work, The Prince, and we
ascribe to both the author and anyone we deem Machiavellian the
qualities of ruthlessness and arrogance. But is that what
Machiavelli really was? A new translation of The Prince
may help answer that question.
True, Machiavelli’s work has, for the past 500 years, become both the source of bedtime stories for all the great despots and the source of countless groans for countless 11th graders. And taken out of context, The Prince may seem like a Ruling Tyrannically for Dummies book, in that it teaches that it is better to be feared than loved.
The thing is, Machiavelli doesn’t really promote cruelty. He simply says that if a ruler’s ultimate goal is to keep the principality together, then fear will generally do the trick. He writes that “[a] prince … must be indifferent to the charge of cruelty if he is to keep his subjects loyal and united. Having set an example once or twice, he may thereafter act far more mercifully than the princes who, through excessive kindness, allow disorders to arise from which murder and plunder ensue.” And why does he say that? Maybe it’s because that’s what he figured rulers wanted to hear. Consider that Machiavelli himself was fired right before writing The Prince. When the Medici family came into power in Florence, it seems they felt that Machiavelli, who was a public servant at the time, would best serve the family by not working for them. Since Machiavelli desperately wanted back into politics, he figured the best way to please the powerful was to tell them, unapologetically, how best to stay in power. So, maybe Machiavelli was a ruthless political philosopher who condoned evil dictatorship. Or maybe he was just a bureaucrat who wanted a new job. — J.D. Reid